Category: Blog

Barack Obama has expanded his lead in California – with 46% he is now ahead of Clinton’s 40%. He has also taken the lead in Missouri with 47% (compared to her 42%), and is now even with her in New Jersey, each with 43%. He’s definitely gaining momentum!

Robert De Niro recently gave his opinions on Barack Obama in front of a crowd at the Izod Center in New Jersey:

“Lemme just speak to you young people here,” he continued. “The rest of you can listen –it’s okay. I’ve been concerned that so many of you aren’t voting…. No one inspired you. You wanted to vote, you just didn’t have anyone you wanted to vote for. You know what? I felt the same. Until now.”

Ms. Winfrey, who for years has been a close friend to Mr. Obama, reaffirmed her support for his presidential candidacy during an interview Tuesday evening on CNNâ€™s Larry King Live. It is the first time that Ms. Winfrey has endorsed â€“ not to mention thrown her brand behind â€“ a political candidate.

â€œWhat made you do so now?â€ Mr. King asked.

â€œBecause I know him personally,â€ Ms. Winfrey replied. â€œI think that what he stands for, what he has proven that he can stand for, what he has shown was worth me going out on a limb for â€“ and I havenâ€™t done it in the past because I havenâ€™t felt that anybody, I didnâ€™t know anybody well enough to be able to say, I believe in this person.â€

Jackson has a long history with one of Obama’s chief rivals, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband former President Clinton. He counseled the two when the president’s affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public.

But Jackson said his history with the Clintons doesn’t complicate his decision to back his home state senator, calling Obama Illinois’ â€œfavorite son.â€

Today, we crave a leader with vision who can help us regain our lost humanity and rekindle our inherent generosity. With courage, caring and charisma, Senator Obama is leading us toward a kinder, gentler world.

An excerpt from Barack Obama’s October 2002 speech in Chicago at an anti Iraq war rally:

“I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”

It’s a very interesting read. Rather than just criticizing, Barack Obama does offer his thoughts on how we can fight the war against terrorism:

“You want a fight, President Bush? Letâ€™s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.”

Barack Obama appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien before making his announcement to run for President. The video is included below:

Conan O’Brien: President Bush is famous for nicknames. Has he tried to give you a nickname?Barack Obama: I can’t tell whether he’s trying to give me a nickname or whether he just can’t pronounce my name.

“We can build a more hopeful America,” Obama said in remarks prepared for delivery. “And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States.”

New website

Also, his official website has been updated and now includes my.barackobama.com which you can use to create a profile, find supporters near you, plan/attend events, network with friends, become a fundraiser and write blog posts.

In this video (posted to YouTube on Feb 9th, 2007), Barack Obama delivers a preview to his Feb 10th announcement and explains a bit about the new features of his website, BarackObama.com and what you can do with it.

“I am absolutely convinced that we can do a different kind of campaign. One that opens up the process and empowers everyday voters all across the country.”

Sources tell The Sleuth that the Obama camp has “frozen out” Fox News reporters and producers in the wake of the network’s major screw-up in running with the erroneous Obama-the-jihadist story reported by Insight magazine.

The situation will most likely not be permanent because if a candidate wants to reach audiences in the red and purple states, they’ll need a network like Fox. But since the false report on Fox News, Obama has given interviews to nearly every network except Fox.

Earlier this week, Barack Obama delivered a speech at a conference of Families USA (a health care advocacy group), stating that every American should have health care coverage by 2012.

For those that missed it, hereâ€™s the full text of Barack Obamaâ€™s prepared speech:

On this January morning of two thousand and seven, more than sixty years after President Truman first issued the call for national health insurance, we find ourselves in the midst of an historic moment on health care. From Maine to California, from business to labor, from Democrats to Republicans, the emergence of new and bold proposals from across the spectrum has effectively ended the debate over whether or not we should have universal health care in this country.

Plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday. The Presidentâ€™s latest proposal that does little to bring down cost or guarantee coverage falls into this category. There will be many others offered in the coming campaign, and I am working with experts to develop my own plan as we speak, but letâ€™s make one thing clear right here, right now:

In the 2008 campaign, affordable, universal health care for every single American must not be a question of whether, it must be a question of how. We have the ideas, we have the resources, and we must find the will to pass a plan by the end of the next presidentâ€™s first term.

I know thereâ€™s a cynicism out there about whether this can happen, and thereâ€™s reason for it. Every four years, health care plans are offered up in campaigns with great fanfare and promise. But once those campaigns end, the plans collapse under the weight of Washington politics, leaving the rest of America to struggle with skyrocketing costs.

For too long, this debate has been stunted by what I call the smallness of our politics â€“ the idea that there isnâ€™t much we can agree on or do about the major challenges facing our country. And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of whoâ€™s up and whoâ€™s down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process.

Well we canâ€™t afford another disappointing charade in 2008. Itâ€™s not only tiresome, itâ€™s wrong. Wrong when businesses have to layoff one employee because they canâ€™t afford the health care of another. Wrong when a parent cannot take a sick child to the doctor because they cannot afford the bill that comes with it. Wrong when 46 million Americans have no health care at all. In a country that spends more on health care than any other nation on Earth, itâ€™s just wrong.

And yet, in recent years, whatâ€™s caught the attention of those who havenâ€™t always been in favor of reform is the realization that this crisis isnâ€™t just morally offensive, itâ€™s economically untenable. For years, the canâ€™t-do crowd has scared the American people into believing that universal health care would mean socialized medicine and burdensome taxes â€“ that we should just stay out of the way and tinker at the margins.

You know the statistics. Family premiums are up by nearly 87% over the last five years, growing five times faster than workersâ€™ wages. Deductibles are up 50%. Co-payments for care and prescriptions are through the roof.

Nearly 11 million Americans who are already insured spent more than a quarter of their salary on health care last year. And over half of all family bankruptcies today are caused by medical bills.

But they say itâ€™s too costly to act.

Almost half of all small businesses no longer offer health care to their workers, and so many others have responded to rising costs by laying off workers or shutting their doors for good. Some of the biggest corporations in America, giants of industry like GM and Ford, are watching foreign competitors based in countries with universal health care run circles around them, with a GM car containing twice as much health care cost as a Japanese car.

But they say itâ€™s too risky to act.

They tell us itâ€™s too expensive to cover the uninsured, but they donâ€™t mention that every time an American without health insurance walks into an emergency room, we pay even more. Our familyâ€™s premiums are $922 higher because of the cost of care for the uninsured.

We pay $15 billion more in taxes because of the cost of care for the uninsured. And itâ€™s trapped us in a vicious cycle. As the uninsured cause premiums to rise, more employers drop coverage. As more employers drop coverage, more people become uninsured, and premiums rise even further.

But the skeptics tell us that reform is too costly, too risky, too impossible for America.

Well the skeptics must be living somewhere else. Because when you see what the health care crisis is doing to our families, to our economy, to our country, you realize that caution is whatâ€™s costly. Inaction is whatâ€™s risky. Doing nothing is whatâ€™s impossible when it comes to health care in America.

Itâ€™s time to act. This isnâ€™t a problem of money, this is a problem of will. A failure of leadership. We already spend $2.2 trillion a year on health care in this country. My colleague, Senator Ron Wyden, whoâ€™s recently developed a bold new health care plan of his own, tells it this way:

For the money Americans spent on health care last year, we could have hired a group of skilled physicians, paid each one of them $200,000 to care for just seven families, and guaranteed every single American quality, affordable health care.

So whereâ€™s all that money going? We know that a quarter of it â€“ one out of every four health care dollars â€“ is spent on non-medical costs; mostly bills and paperwork. And we also know that this is completely unnecessary. Almost every other industry in the world has saved billions on these administrative costs by doing it all online. Every transaction you make at a bank now costs them less than a penny. Even at the Veterans Administration, where it used to cost nine dollars to pull up your medical record, new technology means you can call up the same record on the internet for next to nothing.

But because we havenâ€™t updated technology in the rest of the health care industry, a single transaction still costs up to twenty-five dollars – not one dime of which goes toward improving the quality of our health care.

This is simply inexcusable, and if we brought our entire health care system online, something everyone from Ted Kennedy to Newt Gingrich believes we should do, weâ€™d already be saving over $600 million a year on health care costs.

The federal government should be leading the way here. If you do business with the federal employee health benefits program, you should move to an electronic claims system. If you are a provider who works with Medicare, you should have to report your patientâ€™s health outcomes, so that we can figure out, on a national level, how to improve health care quality. These are all things experts tell us must be done but arenâ€™t being done. And the federal government should lead.

Another, more controversial area we need to look at is how much of our health care spending is going toward the record-breaking profits earned by the drug and health care industry. Itâ€™s perfectly understandable for a corporation to try and make a profit, but when those profits are soaring higher and higher each year while millions lose their coverage and premiums skyrocket, we have a responsibility to ask why.

At a time when businesses are facing increased competition and workers rarely stay with one company throughout their lives, we also have to ask if the employer-based system of health care itself is still the best for providing insurance to all Americans. We have to ask what we can do to provide more Americans with preventative care, which would mean fewer doctorâ€™s visits and less cost down the road. We should make sure that every single child whoâ€™s eligible is signed up for the childrenâ€™s health insurance program, and the federal government should make sure that our states have the money to make that happen. And we have to start looking at some of the interesting ideas on comprehensive reform that are coming out of states like Maine and Illinois and California, to see what we can replicate on a national scale and what will move us toward that goal of universal coverage for all.

But regardless of what combination of policies and proposals get us to this goal, we must reach it. We must act. And we must act boldly. As one health care advocate recently said, â€œThe most expensive course is to do nothing.â€ But it wasnâ€™t a liberal Democrat or union leader who said this.

It was the president of the very health industry association that funded the â€œHarry and Louiseâ€ ads designed to kill the Clinton health care plan in the early nineties.

The debate in this country over health care has shifted. The support for comprehensive reform that organizations like Families USA have worked so hard to build is now widespread, and the diverse group of business and health industry interests that are part of your Health Care Coverage Coalition is a testament to that success. And so Washington no longer has an excuse for caution. Leaders no longer have a reason to be timid. And America can no longer afford inaction. Thatâ€™s not who we are â€“ and thatâ€™s not the story of our nationâ€™s improbable progress.

Half a century ago, America found itself in the midst of another health care crisis. For millions of elderly Americans, the single greatest cause of poverty and hardship was the crippling cost of health care and the lack of affordable insurance. Two out of every three elderly Americans had annual incomes of less than $1,000, and only one in eight had health insurance.

As health care and hospital costs continued to rise, more and more private insurers simply refused to insure our elderly, believing they were too great of a risk to care for.

The resistance to action was fierce. Proponents of health care reform were opposed by well-financed, well-connected interest groups who spared no expense in telling the American people that these efforts were â€œdangerousâ€ and â€œun-American,â€ â€œrevolutionaryâ€ and even â€œdeadly.â€

And yet the reformers marched on. They testified before Congress and they took their case to the country and they introduced dozens of different proposals but always, always they stood firm on their goal to provide health care for every American senior. And finally, after years of advocacy and negotiation and plenty of setbacks, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law on July 30th of 1965.

The signing ceremony was held in Missouri, in a town called Independence, with the first man who was bold enough to issue the call for universal health care â€“ President Harry Truman.

And as he stood with Truman by his side and signed what would become the most successful government program in history â€“ a program that had seemed impossible for so long â€“ President Johnson looked out at the crowd and said, â€œHistory shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history.â€

Never forget that we have it within our power to shape history in this country. It is not in our character to sit idly by as victims of fate or circumstance, for we are a people of action and innovation, forever pushing the boundaries of whatâ€™s possible.

Now is the time to push those boundaries once more. We have come so far in the debate on health care in this country, but now we must finally answer the call first issued by Truman, advanced by Johnson, and fought for by so many leaders and Americans throughout the last century. The time has come for universal health care in America. And I look forward to working with all of you to meet this challenge in the weeks and months to come. Thank you.